Years of M-A-T-H-S

In nineteen years of my life, there are very few things that my thick skull hasn’t penetrated. Maths, being one the ones that haven’t. Its funny how numbers have an uncanny way of multiplying into different totals every time I try to work out a stupid sum. I’m being man enough to admit, that I sucked at the subject. And more so because of mum. Now that I’ve grown up, I know that mum’s arithmetic stinks too (she got 8 on 50 in a stinker class test), but I assume she got some sort of a sadistic pleasure in seeing a defenseless soul struggle with fractions and decimals. I cried and I sobbed and I gave her teary-eyed looks that would melt a yeti, but no, my mother was unmoved. No, I’m not saying that the woman has no emotions, but when it comes to maths, she transforms into this monster with no pity on helpless babies.
Of all the stupid bullshit involved with maths, like trigonometry (if I find person who came up with this singularly most annoying concept, I will dig him or her from his or her grave and make him or her eat his own bloody organs after painfully disemboweling him or her), BODMAS (that sounds like the name of a bra manufacturing company), simultaneous equations (simultaneous with what? Cussing?), I have had most trouble getting along with multiplication tables. I still can’t do the ruddy things. I hate them, abhor them, and wouldn’t even wish them on Isha (this girl who makes my face flush with uncontrollable rage and bottled up plans for a successful homicide). But I will not digress, and come back to those worthless multiplication tables. I detest them more than normal quantities because of my dear darling mother.
At the beginning of every, and I mean EVERY eagerly-awaited vacation, a vacation I used to wither away anticipating, a vacation in the pursuit of which I patiently bore the injustice inflicted on me during schooldays with the patience of saints, martyrs and philanthropists put together and the only time of the year I looked forward to for innumerable reasons, my mother used to make me learn multiplication tables by rote. Every fucking vacation. Where are those mums in TV serials and movies, who actually hand their kids a basketball and watch them go and play? All lies, I tell you. The cheek of it all. I had to come home half an hour early, leaving in half a cricket or lagori match, and do those tables. I accomplished little, except wet my notebooks with XXL sized tears, as I heard my friends shout with laughter and fun. Maybe that explains why I had to do the same set of tables the next year; the bloody cunts miraculously evaporated from my memory store promptly after I managed to get them in, just like stupid mischievous kids. So I generally ended up doing the same things I sacrificed my social life for, the previous year.
I vividly remember sitting at my table with my books, cursing my luck, my mum, my friends and my fate with all the swear words I could muster back then. My mum would sit right behind me with a book, and I died to get back to my Enid Blytons, if not my friends. Its decent manners to at least pretend you’re doing something boring, to make me feel better. I used to ask her some doubts, just to kill time. And since I never paid attention while she answered them, I would be in a fix if I was faced with the same problem again. So, if she sensed I wasn’t exactly paying attention, I got a back-breaking thump in the middle of a sum. Or a doubt solving quest. Or anything that convinced her I wasn’t doing a task at hand. Down came her hand on her back. Or maybe my shoulder; let’s just say any place she got. After the initial shock ebbed off, I would settle down into my chair, trying to work out the problem on my own, more befuddled than ever. In a blinding flash of insight I’d go to the last page of my book and find all the working to that very sum. Well, if she’d known we’d done it before, she could have said so. Why get into a fist fight? Mums sure are strange.
Anyway, needless to say, I am finally free of that dreaded and detested subject. Now, I sit back and giggle (and point fingers) at my friends, who are pursuing engineering and the likes. They struggle, they suffer, they bury their heads in despair, and look at me with mounting frustration. I am full of poise, dignity and not to mention lots of free time. Which is exactly why, I have time to sit for hours at my pc, churn up posts that are no use to mankind, listen to my favourite music, with a cup of steaming coffee (provided by the same woman who tormented me so much during those sinfully boring hours), with nothing to do apart from curling up in bed and reading W. Somerset Maugham’s Mrs. Craddock.
Man, I love my life!